Leadership in the abstract

It is hard to imagine Mr. Obama wandering along to watch a Memorial Day or Fourth of July parade until the job required him to do so. That's not to say he's un-American or anti-American, but merely that he's beyond all that. Way beyond. He's the first president to give off the pronounced whiff that he's condescending to the job - that it's really too small for him and he's just killing time until something more commensurate with his stature comes along.

And so the Gulf spill was an irritation, but he dutifully went through the motions of flying in to be photographed looking presidentially concerned. As he wearily explained to Matt Lauer, "I was meeting with fishermen down there, standing in the rain, talking." Good grief, what more do you people want? Alas, he's not a good enough actor to fake it. So the more desperately he butchers up the rhetoric - "Plug the damn hole ... I know whose ass to kick" - the more pathetically unconvincing it all sounds.

No doubt my observations about Mr. Obama's remoteness from the rhythms of American life will be seen by his dwindling band of beleaguered cheerleaders as just another racist, right-wing attempt to whip up the backwoods, knuckle-dragging swamp dwellers of America by playing on their fears of "the other" - the sophisticated, worldly cosmopolitan for whom France is more than a reliable punch line. But in fact, my complaint is exactly the opposite: Mr. Obama's postmodern detachment is feeble and parochial. It's true that he hadn't seen much of America until he ran for president, but he hadn't seen much of anywhere else, either. Like most multiculturalists, he has passed his entire adulthood in a very narrow unicultural environment where your ideological worldview doesn't depend on anything so tedious as actually viewing the world.

Even more fundamental, I think the American people sense a lack of real passion for anything from this man. His claim to being "non-ideological" has been exposed as has his promise to be non-partisan. In a way, this cold, calculating man is even more dangerous than a hothead; he makes the radical sound reasonable while dishing out scathing, and calumnious rhetoric against his opponents while mixing in pious proclamations of his non-partisan beliefs.

It is hard to imagine Mr. Obama wandering along to watch a Memorial Day or Fourth of July parade until the job required him to do so. That's not to say he's un-American or anti-American, but merely that he's beyond all that. Way beyond. He's the first president to give off the pronounced whiff that he's condescending to the job - that it's really too small for him and he's just killing time until something more commensurate with his stature comes along.

And so the Gulf spill was an irritation, but he dutifully went through the motions of flying in to be photographed looking presidentially concerned. As he wearily explained to Matt Lauer, "I was meeting with fishermen down there, standing in the rain, talking." Good grief, what more do you people want? Alas, he's not a good enough actor to fake it. So the more desperately he butchers up the rhetoric - "Plug the damn hole ... I know whose ass to kick" - the more pathetically unconvincing it all sounds.

No doubt my observations about Mr. Obama's remoteness from the rhythms of American life will be seen by his dwindling band of beleaguered cheerleaders as just another racist, right-wing attempt to whip up the backwoods, knuckle-dragging swamp dwellers of America by playing on their fears of "the other" - the sophisticated, worldly cosmopolitan for whom France is more than a reliable punch line. But in fact, my complaint is exactly the opposite: Mr. Obama's postmodern detachment is feeble and parochial. It's true that he hadn't seen much of America until he ran for president, but he hadn't seen much of anywhere else, either. Like most multiculturalists, he has passed his entire adulthood in a very narrow unicultural environment where your ideological worldview doesn't depend on anything so tedious as actually viewing the world.

Even more fundamental, I think the American people sense a lack of real passion for anything from this man. His claim to being "non-ideological" has been exposed as has his promise to be non-partisan. In a way, this cold, calculating man is even more dangerous than a hothead; he makes the radical sound reasonable while dishing out scathing, and calumnious rhetoric against his opponents while mixing in pious proclamations of his non-partisan beliefs.